“To err is human, but to really foul things up you need a computer.” So goes an old quip attributed to Paul Ehrlich. He was right. One of the defining things about computers is that they–or, more specifically, the people who program them–get so many things so very wrong. Hence the need for error messages, which have been around nearly as long as computers themselves..

In theory, error messages should be painful at worst and boring at best. They tend to be cryptic; they rarely offer an apology even when one is due; they like to provide useless information like hexadecimal numbers and to withhold facts that would be useful, like plain-English explanations of how to right want went wrong. In multiple ways, most of them represent technology at its most irritating.

In fact, people have an emotional attachment to many of them–like Proust’s Madeleine, an error message from a machine out of your past can transport you back in time. That’s a big part of why people form clubs to celebrate them, have them tattooed on their person, chronicle them for Wikipedia, and name albums after them. An entire company, the wonderfully-named Errorwear, exists to emblazon the images of such classic errors as the Blue Screen of Death (in four variations!), Guru Meditation, Red Ring of Death, and Sad Mac on T-shirts.

And then there’s this article–my stab at rounding up the major error messages of the past thirty years or so. I ranked them on a variety of factors, including how many people they bedeviled over the years, their aesthetic appeal or lack thereof, and the likelihood that they were notifying you of a genuine computing disaster. Your rankings probably differ from mine, which is why this story ends with a poll on the last page.

Ready? Let’s work through the list, starting with number thirteen and working our way up to the greatest error message of ’em all.

13. Abort, Retry, Fail?(MS-DOS)In many ways, it remains an error message to judge other error messages by. It’s terse. (Three words.) It’s confusing. (What’s the difference between Abort and Fail?) It could indicate either a minor glitch (you forgot to put a floppy disk in the drive) or catastrophe (your hard drive had died). And by forcing you to choose between three options, none of which is likely to help, it throws the problem back in your face.

It’s Abort, Retry, Fail?–known in earlier incarnations of MS-DOS by the equally uninformative name Abort, Retry, Ignore?. ARF was probably the first error message to become part of the cultural zeitgeist, as witness its use as the title of a long-running PC Magazine column and a 1996 album by UK technopop act White Town. In this post-floppy era, few of us encounter it. But just thinking about the phrase is enough to send me back to the days when I frequently sat at a computer displaying that message, randomly hitting the A, R, and F keys in hopes that something helpful would happen.

12. Guru Meditation (Commodore Amiga)The Amiga was a famously advanced multimedia computer, considering that it was designed back in the primitive mid-1980s. But its most alarming error message was decidedly minimalist: red text on a black background, dressed up only by a flashing red border. Like many errors, it included some hexadecimal numbers that were meaningless to 99.9999999999999% of folks who encountered them. But it preceded them with the phrase “Guru Meditation.” When I owned an Amiga, I was never sure what that meant; the reference to a state of zen never did a thing to lower my blood pressure. Turns out that it was a self-indulgent reference to a game the Amiga designers used to play with their first product, the Joyboard–an Atari VCS joystick that you stood on. Har, har.

Like Windows’ later Blue Screen of Death, the Guru Meditation had a habit of showing up in the darndest places, thanks to the wide use of Amigas in the broadcasting industry and for other audio/visual tasks. Once I turned on my TV and saw a Guru Meditation onscreen, and reached to reboot my Amiga–until I realized that it wasn’t even the same room. My cable company’s channel guide, it turned out, had crashed.

11. The Red Screen of Death (Windows)Microsoft’s infamous Screens of Death come in multiple colors? Who knew? According to Wikipedia, some beta versions of Longhorn–the operating system that became Windows Vista–crashed with a full-screen error message that was red rather than the more familiar blue. Wikipedia seems to say that the final version of Vista can die with a red color scheme when the boot loader has problems, too. I’m relieved to say I’ve never encountered that, as far as I can remember.

I do like the idea of an exclusive SoD in a designer color, though. Maybe Microsoft should team with the (Product) Red folks and revive the RSoD as a charitable effort? If I knew that fifty cents went to a worthy cause every time my PC croaked, I’d be at least slightly less apoplectic.

523 Comments For This Post

I once returned two CPUs due to the Post beeps on my system. According to the manufacturer of the motherboard, the set of beeps I was hearing meant a failed CPU. Actually, the RAM was bad and confusing the system into thinking the CPU was bad.

When I was 5, I did something to my parents brand new ($5000) Macintosh and got sad mac. I thought I'd destroyed the machine and hid under my bed. All they did was eject the floppy I'd left in and kept on going.

Back in the day, my Cadnetix workstation once put up: "We should never get here." That's high on my list of informative and reassuring messages.

As for the BSOD screensaver, it once went off while I was chairing a meeting with a spreadsheet on projector. Onscreen was the morning's work for about thirty engineers who had flown to Las Vegas to thrash out details of the electrical specs for DDR2 (you may have heard of it.) Needless to say, the room Was Not Happy — until I hit the control key and all was well again. (There's a reason I use Linux on my laptops!)

I think the best (or worst) error message came from some versions of Microsoft BASIC:

?REDO FROM START

Not only does it have the rather pointless question mark at the beginning, but it actually told you to do the same thing that it just complained about over again. Since English is my second language, and I was a kid at the time, I always assumed that I simply must have missed the translation.

That’s not Times Square in the photo credited to Chad Dickerson, that’s Penn station, more particularly it is the southwest corner of the intersection of 42nd street and 8th avenue. Times square is the next avenue over (intersection of 42nd street, 7th avenue and broadway).

Two of my all-time faves:
“cannot start: hath the daemon spawn no fire?” (qmail)
“The instruction at ‘XXXXX’ referenced memory at ‘YYYYY’. The memory could not be “read”‘ (Windows – love how “read” is in quotes)

That’s not times square in the photo credited to Chad Dickerson. It’s the Port Authority, particularly the southwest corner of 8th avenue and 42nd street (Times square is one avenue over on 42nd/7th avenue/broadway.

The error that continues to frost my cupcakes keeps occurring on the Clarify web application that I use to search for internal Change Requests. Everytime I see this, I want to smack the developers:

"Errors have occurred. We won't tell you where or why. Lazy programmers. – Charlie Gibbs"

The funniest error message that I ever heard about was vanishingly rare, having been created in the Caltech computer center in the early to mid 70's. The TOPS-10 OS running on the DEC PDP-10 machine had been modified by the student operators to emit the error acronym PFDGB upon the occurance of a fatal error. Nobody knew what this meant… BUT, if you went to the terminal room, and searched through the operations manual chained to the desk, in the back, written in PENCIL, was the explanation for the error. Program Fall Down, Go Boom.

The Firesign Theatre album, "I Think We're All Bozo's on This Bus" was conceived in the Caltech Computing Center, and most, if not all of the ideas came from the PDP-10 and some of the Lisp applications running on it. Eliza was a particular source of inpiration, I think. Later in the decade, Vaxes came along, and rendered the album and their PDP-10 jokes irretrievably obscure. But many of us who were there still remember, and smile.

I came back to my office one day with my assistant crying and hysterical. The OS 7.?.? Mac had crashed on her, and instead of the bomb (which would have been bad enough), it played the sound of a car skidding to a stop before crashing.

Horrible sound. Traumatizing sound. About as far as you can get from the happy smiling Mac and comparatively nonthreatening cartoon bomb.

So, the Mac car-crash sound gets my vote for scaring the hell out of the people who hear it.

What about the predecessor to Windows’s “Unhandled Exception,” the scary “This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down.” Scared the hell out of little kids who suddenly thought they broke the law.

The “check engine” light (sometimes just an icon!) on car dashboards. It can signal anything from a loose gas cap to a thrown rod and it REQUIRES you to either purchase a special decoder gizmo to hook up to your engine, or to pay someone to diagnose it for you.

I’m glad someone else pointed out the FailWhale. I always assumed the same, after all the service is called “Twitter” which I had always heard used to describe a short chirp from a bird. Hence the twitter “birds” being dragged down by the, oddly happy, FailWhale. Personally I am a big fan of the error message I use at work when they try to access and unapproved website. There is a picture of a kitten shoped over a hubble photo and it says “Space Cat says No. If Space Cat is wrong contact your System Admin so you can explain why you attempted to go to X.” X would be the URL. I love my job.

Actually, DOS error query function has all four options – Abort, Retry, Fail, Ignore – and whatever triggers the message can choose which to present, though one can’t be turned off (I think that’s either Abort or Ignore). Abort kills the program, Retry retries the operation, Fail reports the error to the program, and Ignore simply lies to the program, telling it the operation succeeded. Which is the greater disaster depends on the operation involved.
As for terse messages, I must say the standard UNIX editor, ed, must take that prize. It only has one error message – “?”.

I (and others) would argue that 404 is the most important error message of all time, and the most important contribution that made the web possible. There were other hyperlink systems before that, but people were afraid of linking to remote machines because it might get an error. Embracing and allowing 404 really made the web take off.

The wikipedia article has been corrected – the Sad Mac was already there in 1984. What was introduced in 1987 was the two line hex code shown in your screen capture (originally the code was just one line).

I distinctly remember sitting as a lab assistant in one of the Computer Science labs in the mid-90s. We were supposed to watch the syslog to see if anything weird was happening. Suddenly there was a message about the printer (right across from my desk) being on fire. At first I thought it was a joke from one of the sysadmins. Turns out the printer was indeed overheating (though far from catching on fire), but it was still quite a startling message.

On Radio Shack Model 16, XENIX 3.0, in a really obscure hardware failure condition (the Z80 got back to the main operation dispatch loop with the stack at a different depth than it was on the previous pass), z80ctl would spit out:

General Protection Fault is my favorite from Windows 3.1. As a telephone tech support agent back in the mid 90’s I actually had a customer call and ask for the rank and serial number of this so-called general. I swear to you, the person was serious.

Does anyone else remember
“ENTER LOCATION OF MORE LOADER INPUT, UXREF, CANCEL OR RETURN TO IGNORE?”

This comes from the Michigan Terminal System (MTS) linking loader when it couldn’t resolve all the symbols in a program. If you were very lucky you could type something like
$CONTINUE WITH FILE_WITH_MY_LIBRARY
and recover, but generally “CANCEL” was the correct answer.

“wrong magic number” – in 1988, working in the dead of night, I was loading BSD 4.3 on a Convex C1 from a reel to reel tape, when I tried booting up the console started spitting out “wrong magic number” over and over, as fast as it could print.
Calling Convex didn’t help either, but the next day they sent me a new tape. It was much later, looking over even older Unix documentation, that I found that the magic number was the file protection mask (look up chmod).
I didn’t want to have anything to do with Unix for a long time after that experience.

This error message was near-universal from 1970 to circa 1995. Anybody who ever owned an TRaSh-80, Apple II, Atari 400/800, Commodore, Amiga, MS-DOS, or other platform that used BASIC saw this error frequently.

Lots of people mention the keyboard error/press F1 to continue, but I personally think that one is pretty good. It only SOUNDS self-contradictory, and it’s actually helpful (unlike most of the errors on the list.)
It tells you:
– what’s wrong – the computer won’t go on until you fix the keyboard
– how to fix it – press F1 as soon as there’s a valid F1 to press.
Unlike the PS/2 mouse, it’s always been OK to plug/unplug a PC keyboard while the power is on, so the fix is dead easy – unless your keyboard is actually broken, in which case your weren’t going anywhere without a new one anyway.
If you’re savvy enough to figure out that 0/1 is the power switch, this one shouldn’t have set you back for more than a minute.

Likewise with “PC LOAD LETTER”. “PC” was the name of the tray that was empty; I’ll freely admit that that’s pretty cryptic. But “LOAD LETTER”? If that doesn’t speak to you, what are you doing with a printer?

Good old segfault, you knew you really b0rked something up when that one greeted you mid way through executing something or other. For those on the Windows side of things, this was the UNIX/Linux version of either “This program performed an illegal operation” or “General Protection Fault” depending on which version of Windows you’re talking about.

1 – The apple bomb was spoofed in the intro of one of the new mac’s. Apple had a video presentation with music and lots of screen captures flashing by. One of the screen was of a bomb message. The crowd roared when they saw it.
2 – One of our programmers put in an error message of “Bang – Your Dead”. It was supposed to be impossible to get too. Murphy rules: It happened to a customer in an Oil Refinery. The PRESIDENT of the BIG Oil company complained to our President. That is unprofessional!

“Who distributes the screensaver? Microsoft–and I’m not sure whether I’m tickled by that, or annoyed that they aren’t taking the whole thing more seriously.”

In all fairness, the screensaver was developed by Mark Russinovich’s company Sysinternals prior to Microsoft buying the company and all of its software and employing Mark. The Microsoft Sysinternals page is here, with the screensaver under the Misc section:

The screensaver is actually very clever, it uses the error and bootup screens of the version of Windows you’re actually using, and it uses your actual hardware information to show relevant diagnostic messages during “startup”. It appears as if your computer is in a neverending boot-BSoD-reboot cycle, which lasts until you hit Esc. I had it loaded on my computer at work and came back from lunch more than once to find out that someone, thinking they were being helpful, had shut my computer off by holding down the power button.

The IBM POST was my favorite. The reason I was told for the beeps by some IBM old-timers was that they had this massive typewriter repair force (remember the IBM Selectric) that was about to have nothing to do because of the PC. By having the POST beep codes, the repairman would just look up the meaning it their codebook and replace the necessary parts. Back when I was just starting in IT in the early 80’s, I witnessed IBM typewriter repairmen fix many a PC, XT, AT just based on the beeps. Typewriter repair force is now the PC repair force!

IBM JCL processor would issue the following error message (or something close to it – memory failing) when a user requested a SCRATCH tape (a fully writable throwaway tape) for a job step. The JCL wanted a specific spelling, which was limited to 6 characters since a tape VolumeSerial number was that long (VOLSER). Thus:

“SCRATCH” should be spelled “SCRTCH”

and your job would abort. Of course, if the JCL processor KNEW what I meant, then why did it have to abort?!?!?

While not strictly an error message, on the original pcxt, if you put a floppy in a: and typed format insteat of “format a:” you got the message “format C: press any key to continue” The only solution was to kill the power.

[G.E. 635 when there was a peripheral error. RATZ was a prompt for
R – retry or A – abort or T – terminate or Z – go to user-supplied
error routine. And as with MS DOS, what’s the difference between
abort and terminate?]

You have synned and must pay a syn tax [some student-written compiler]

I’ve got a bit of nostalgia for the old “Internal Server Error” encountered on message boards of yore. We used to make up other words to fit the “ISE” acronym like “Internet’s Sort of Empty” or “Isn’t Sarumon Evil?”.

Any of the old OS360 system failure codes – nick named SOCK codes. My favourite was S0C7, but S0C1 and S0C4 were common and equally enlightening as well. If I recall correctly: 0C7 was a DATA error; 0C1 was an INSTRUCTION error; and 0C4 was an ADDRESSING error. Details required a full system core dump to guess what the problem actually was.

Why do we continue to perpetuate this myth that Macs are more stable than PCs? It’s simply not true. I’ve used both Mac and PC consistently for many years, and Macs have always been more prone to unexplained crashes and freezes. Even today, when I’ve got both a Vista PC and an OSX Mac sitting on my desk, the Mac is significantly less stable. Am I really that unlucky?

On teh IBM 7094 in the early 1960,s a divide by 0 caused an endless microinstruction loop that would ultimately damage the circuitry if left to run for more than about a minute. Therefore, all 7094 sites used a cheap 2-trnsistor AM radio to monnitor the comoputer by listening to the generated noise. When the noise ceased to sound like hash and became a pure tone, a divide by zero was being executed and the operator needed to reboot the machine. That pure tone is the worst error message.

‘Syntax Error’ is a far-reaching message omitted from this list – I’ve seen it on many platforms. As a child, I probably learned the meaning of the word ‘syntax’ from it – I certainly remember not being sure what the error message meant in terms of English, but understanding what to do about it.

The one I voted for – although I can’t say it’s my ‘favourite’ – had to be Abort, Retry, Ignore. I remember screaming in pain many times when encountering that one.

Picking up on the Cadnetix theme, back in the mid-80’s, I worked as a software engineer for a Cadnetix “competitor”, Mentor Graphics. I supported about 400,000 lines of code someone else had written in about three weeks’ time (we were a startup, afterall). One day we fielded a call from an irate customer. See, this customer was mad because his missile defense system design work had been interrupted by an error message that said: “Beam me up Scotty, she’s sucking mud!”

My favorite error happened when playing Half Life (the first one). I would get “fatal error: unknown error” How can it be an “unknown” error but you still knew it was an error? I even took a screenshot and have it somewhere.

For the non-techys, when an error occurs usually the program will check to see what type of error it was to better inform the user (ex. if a hard drive was full, or even some cryptic library caused the crash). Unknown error is the ‘catch-all’ when the program wasn’t explicitly told what that error message meant.

If we’re going to include special-case crashes, the BBC Micro had an interesting case. If you type:
10 gos.10:gos.10:gos.10:gos.10:gos.10:gos.10:gos.10:gos.10:gos.10:gos.10:gos.10:gos.10:gos.10:gos.10:gos.10:gos.10:gos.10:gos.10:gos.10:gos.10:gos.10:gos.10:gos.10:gos.10:gos.10:gos.10:gos.10:gos.10:gos.10:gos.10:gos.10:gos.10:gos.10:gos.10:gos.10:gos.10:gos.10
The computer will crash. You don’t even need to run the code, it’ll kill the system stone-dead. Something similar happens if you type:
10 dim a%(1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1)
There was something screwy about the system that caused code that had very specific faults (it has to be a 14-dimensional DIM, and you have to use contracted gosubs in the first case, gotos won’t have the same affect.
The Commodore PET had an interesting POST error – the screen would fill up with random characters, if it failed to past the test. Well, strictly, the screen filled up as part of the test and were cleared by another part. If anything between failed, that’s your BSoD. Well, GSoD, as PET monitors were green screens. If the machine was starting to go wrong, you’d sometimes see those characters freeze for a bit before the system continued.
I can’t remember which one it was but I believe there was an OS that produced ALL of its error messages in a Japanese style of short poetry.
I can’t remember if the Acorn Archimedes, Oric, Sinclair ZX81 or TRS-80 did anything interesting in the way of errors – more fans of the weird and wonderful are obviously needed to fill in this critical gap in knowledge.

My wife works as a social worker and often has to deal with medical
software for elder care planning – she brought home a printout
of a screen dump of an app that said “amputating the head is not an
option” which always makes me laugh when I see it.

I used to work at a company that produced printers. One time I saw the
following error: “The such and such printer utility must shut down as
the developers must go to a really freaky party.” Apparently that was
never supposed to be seen by the public but it did happen once in a
while.

I’m surprised there was no mention of the famous “NTLDR is missing” message that is displayed on Windows NT 4.0 and higher operating systems when there is a problem with the boot drive. That one has been a big annoyance to me for years.

One of my favourite useless error messages I’ve seen was from a Mac program (I forget which):

“something impossible has happened”

I’ve generally found Mac programmers had a flair for witty error text (along with many *nix programmer), although I mostly saw this through examining programs with ResEdit rather than in using the programs.

I have a soft spot too for the really easy to read errors on the ZX81. Classics like 0/1 or other equally eloquent prose could keep one entertained for hours.

While not real error messages and only ever seen by a few class mates, I once wrote a spoof CPM command line interpreter for April fools day in the mid 80s and loaded it on all the machines in the schools lab, spoofing the genuine network boot sequence and then responding to any commands with genuine error messages at first, and then slowly with more frequent pseudo error messages that sounded almost right but getting increasingly silly such as:

Sheesh! You kids had it easy! In my day Crystal Reports didn’t even tell me if I had an error. It would just pop up a dialog box with nothing in it other than an OK button. I first had to find out if it was an error message on my own before I could figure out what the error was! Up hill! Both ways!

From the companion CD for the first printing of Bill Gates’ book The Road Ahead:

“Sorry, The Road Ahead does not run on Windows NT.”

Longest-running useless error message:

“A device attached to the system is not functioning.”

It’s been in Windows for many years, and still rears its ugly head occasionally. I’ve never seen it actually caused by a hardware or device problem, and it provides no clue what went wrong or where to look.

Nice article, it brought back some memories! Too bad BSoD is such an obvious #1…

Probably the worst error screen these days is the VMware Purple Screen of Death. For me, it means that 15 VMs or more just had the power cord yanked on them. Fortunately, like the MS BSoD these days, its rarity.

My favourite error comes from the Remedy app, which many IT departments use to track changes, problems, inventory etc. Remedy is an Action Request System and so anything that goes wrong is an Action Request System Error. When this becomes an acronym it becomes hilarious in certain countries. I remember seeing printed out copies on the wall back in England that read: ‘You have experienced an Action Request System Error (ARSE).’

So many years have passed since first you sought
the lands beyond the edges of the sky,
so many moons reflected in your eye,
(familiar newness, fear of leaving port),
since first you sought, and failed, and learned to fall,
(first hope, then cynicism, silent dread,
the countless stars, still counting overhead
the seconds to your final voyage of all…)
and last, in glory gold and red around
your greatest search, your final quest to know!
yet… ashes drift, the embers cease to glow,
and darkened life in frozen death is drowned;
and ashes on the swell are seen no more.
The silence surges. Error 404.

I would only add a mention the Kernel Panic on modern Linux: When it happens, all just freezes, and while you try to guess what happened since there is no message or anithing, you look at your keyboard, and there is the answer: the flashing “caps lock” LED, telling you that you have a kernel panic.

The BSoD Screen saver that is now available on Microsoft’s website was actually written by the boys at SysInternals, the people that brought Process Explorer and PS tools to the world. These programs (and others) were so much more useful than the Microsoft versions that I and a few others I know used them as System32 drop in replacements for the official utility. It seems that Microsoft noticed this too, so like always, they bought out SysInternals and thus started distributing a screen saver that does a fantastic job of mocking their OS.

As of all time favorite Error messages, I’m not sure, the most memorable however was the first time I got a Kernel Panic on my linux box. Happened when I rebooted after my first ever kernel build…

Before Windows, before AmigaDOS, before MS-DOS, there was CP/M, a tiny OS that shoehorned the whole OS, plus one application (Wordstar, Fortran, etc) into 64k of RAM.
It didn’t have much space for error messages.
It’s equivalent of the BSOD was –
“BDOS error on A/B”, depending on whether the problem was associated with the A or B floppy drive.

The fictional “Excuse me don’t excuse me Ah Clem, you have made The Doctor unhappy happy, and will be asked to leave the future immediately”.

This was from “I Think We’re All Bozos On This Bus” by the Firesign Theatre. This cult comedy album described “The Future Faire”, an entirely virtual theme park where you got to speak to a hologram of President Nixon, who was “The Terminal Bus”. Ah Clem was your quintessential hacker (“Please state your name” — Ah…Clem.) who gummed up the works. Verra strongly recommended listen if you find a copy.

Rather visionary, considering it was composed during the punch-card era.

During my college days I programmed an SDS Sigma 7 running BTM/BPM and UTS/CP-V.

If, during a timesharing session, you fouled up a command, you would
get the error
$ EH @ xx
where xx was the offset from the first char where the command line parser figured out something’s wrong.

When the system crashed, it would send to all timesharing terminals:
(bell)(bell)Recovery says stand by…

With the FORTRAN compiler, if you used “JAIL” as the variable in an
assigned GO TO, i.e. “GO TO JAIL”, the compiler would emit the error
message:
WARNING GO DIRECTLY. DO NOT PASS GO.
DO NOT COLLECT $200. STATEMENT DELETED.

My personal favorite was Windows’ “You have performed an illegal operation.” When Windows was throwing that around willy-nilly, any seasoned Windows user thought, “BFD.”

Now, imagine my aunt’s surprise when this occurred when she bought her first computer back in 1998. There are three things that you need to know about my aunt:

1. She’s a luddite.
2. She’s neurotic.
3. At the time, she was a cop.

When “You have performed an illegal operation” popped she.freaked.the.h.e.double.hockey.sticks.out. It was really quite comical. She truly believed that she had done something against the law and was going to jail. I have fond memories of this day.

The TRS-80 Model III Level 1 computer had a “friendly” version of BASIC that reported only three possible errors – “What?”, “How?” and “Sorry!”. “What?” means syntax error, “How?” was a procedural error and “Sorry!” meant out of memory. This was more “friendly” to the user than all of those cryptic words like “syntax”. Type in a 20 line program with a syntax error somewhere then run it and get “What?”.

IIRC, the original BSOD was just blue (no text at all); I first saw it in a Windows beta. The docs that came with the beta actually referenced the error as “the blue screen of death” and, when we called M$ to tell them we’d seen a BSOD, they wanted to know where we’d heard the name (it was removed from the next copy of the docs).

The joys of learning to progam (and now teaching it):
COBOL (data error – 15 years since I programmed in COBOL as a student and it is still ingrained in my head):
INVALID DECIMAL DATA
SYMBOLIC STACK DUMP

Smalltalk (just about any syntax error – 15 years ago and no fond memories):
Smalltalk does not understand

I think one of the best BSoD I ever saw was at COMDEX. We arrived early for the Bill Gates speech. There was a few dozen people already there. They had the projector on and was setting up the Microsoft demo for Gate’s speech when the blue screen appeared. The person quickly turned off the projector. The funny thing is they were demoing WIN ME which they claimed was more stable then 98 or 95. The WIN ME had multiple errors during the presentation while the WIN98 demo machine was solid as a rock. They tried over and over to get the WIN98 machine to crash and it wouldn’t

One of my favorites is a Linux error. It appears in several KDE applications, such as K3B and the print tool, that are just front ends for command line tools.

“Error: Success!”

Also, the X Windowing System (the Linux GUI) used to give an error along the lines of:
ERROR: I don’t know what to go. Giving up.

Finally, several people have already mentioned the blinking keyboard LEDs for Linux kernel panics. What many people don’t know is that there is an option to have the actual error transmitted in morse code via the LEDs.

My favorite error message was from Windows 2000 (I think), when I got a blue screen that said: “Your system has become unstable. Wait for it to become stable again, or reboot.” Well I waited and waited, then went out for lunch, and since it hadn’t become stable again after 2 hours (now did you really think it would have?)… I rebooted it.

The Macintosh Programmer’s Workshop C compiler (what you used to make Mac programs prior to MacOS X) had a number of quirky error messages that would pop up in unusual situations. Four of my favorites (from memory — not exact) were:

You cannot swim upstream, modify a constant, win an argument with the IRS, or satisfy this compiler.

String constant exceeds 512 bytes (which is three more than what ANSI says I must give you).

Out of memory for symbol table: please go purchase more RAM from your Authorized Apple Dealer.

No BDOS ERR ON A: SELECT? yet? CP/M was even more cryptic than DOS sometimes.

The best, and most frustrating error I’ve ever seen was on a PDP-11/34A running Unix System 3. These were used to test relay frames, and had line printers as the only output. You could start a test, and turn away from them – the noise of the printer would tell you how the test was going. Every so often, the printer would stop, and just as you turned back, it would spit out “Death.”

the ‘Keyboard not present. press F1 to continue’ error should have been No.1

Some of my own favourites:

I pulled out my modem once, put it back, and when I rebooted my BIOS beeped ‘de do de do de do…’. One beep would have meant OK, two would have meant bad RAM (or something), a siren though? New PC time.

From the game Narbacular Drop: “D3D takeover of window failed. This should never happen, so there’s really nothing you can do.”

From Dr Watson (error reporter): “Dr Watson Postmortem debugger has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience.”

I once returned two CPUs due to the Post beeps on my system. According to the manufacturer of the motherboard, the set of beeps I was hearing meant a failed CPU. Actually, the RAM was bad and confusing the system into thinking the CPU was bad.
When I was 5, I did something to my parents brand new ($5000) Macintosh and got sad mac. I thought I’d destroyed the machine and hid under my bed. All they did was eject the floppy I’d left in and kept on going.

Only a woman could be that stupid when it came to computers. Go back to hiding under your bed n00b.

The original TRS-80s, with the “level 1″ 4K ROM, had three error messages: WHAT? (syntax error), HOW? (runtime error), and SORRY (out of memory). At least it displayed the offending line with a question mark in more or less the place where the error was found.

“Ultimately, it’s not going too far to say that the BSoD is a sort of persistent, universal reminder of the fallibility of computers …”

No, it’s not. It’s a reminder of the fallibility of humans. Computers “fail” because those who built it or programmed it or use it have done something wrong. It’s not the hammer’s fault if the head flies off the handle. Don’t blame the tool for the shortcomings of humankind.

This refers to a large computer manufacturer (former employer of some of the
Apollo OS folks) that once bid on a government contract to supply computing
equipment for use on board submarines. They lost the contract when the
government discovered that the tape drive would not fit through the 25 inch
hatch used to load equipment onto a submarine. Anything that won’t fit
through the hatch has to be loaded by cutting a hole in the hull.

*snip*
The Sad Mac has such a strong flavor of early Macintosh-ishness that it’s easy to develop a false memory that it was part of the platform from the beginning in 1984. Nope–Wikipedia says it first appeared in 1987
*snip*

And who ever uses wikipedia as a reliable source of information? I have an original 1984 Macintosh in my collection that greets me with a sad mac every time I turn it on due to a failed RAM chip.

For those who remember mainframes, the best (IBM) mainframe error was 0C0 — Imprecise Interrupt. Somewhere back in the preceding 63 halfwords of instructions (as interpreted by the machine, so not just in the program(s) under consideration) was one (or more!) conditions that caused an interrupt. When? Where? Why? Only the hardware designers knew for sure (and they weren’t around to tell you).

Not only are all “add-ons” enabled, but WTF is with “add-on?” is this microspeak for plugin? what’s wrong with plugin? everybody else in the world informally convened and agreed to use “plugin” to mean plugin. why does microsoft unnecessarily complicating things have to run into to vocabulary too ? i want an answer on this choice of word – “add-on.” And while I’m at it, how about (also from IE8)

“You have approved this plugin to run on the following sites: *”

Really? “*”??? Now is that “*.com”, “*.org” or “*.*”? I see microsoft has really made great strides towards making their products more user-friendly since their “illegal operation” error messages . . .

The keyboard errors suggesting you press F1 to continue were only funny if you were a moron. If you were not a moron, you simply reconnected the keyboard connector that had become dislodged, and pressed F1, as suggested. I have much fonder memories of the SYNTAX ERROR I saw all too often when my poorly-coded BASIC programs crashed on the ol’ Apple II.

Those lines mean “boot record not found” and “insert a bootable system disk and restart the system.” You would see them if you (or somebody else) formatted a diskette with OS/2, inserted the diskette in Drive A (the boot drive, on your machine or someone else’s), and restarted the system. These cryptic errors confused almost everyone.

You would see these two lines instead of, say, “Diskette not bootable” for two reasons. The first reason is that the boot sector contains limited space, so the messages had to be short. The second reason is that IBM product development bureaucracy ran amok. Instead of displaying an error message that would be decipherable to at least the English-reading world, IBM national language standards required that the error message be language-neutral and thus indecipherable to the whole world. Since (unlike a Mac) there are no graphics available at that point in the boot process, there was no opportunity to display the equivalent of a Sad Mac (or Sad Diskette). And since you cannot fit all major languages in just a few bytes, you got a pair of cryptic SYS numbers. The “OS/2″ part was completely misleading. That was supposed to mean “check your OS/2 documentation for a list of error messages to figure out what the rest of this means,” but the immediate cause of the error had nothing whatsoever to do with OS/2. You’d see this same error if you left any OS/2-formatted diskette in Drive A and rebooted a DOS, Windows, or Linux PC. (OS/2 formatted diskettes as FAT also, so that wasn’t the issue.)

IBM is very good about providing error numbers for every error, which helps make supporting their products much easier. And the rest of OS/2 (i.e. after boot) would always display the error description alongside the code number in whatever national language was active at the time. That’s all really great design. But in this particular case IBM got silly.

Unfortunately IBM never fixed this. They insisted this was “working as designed.” Which is exactly the problem. They could have even fit “Floppy in Drive!” (or “Diskette Error!”) as the first line and kept “OS/2 !! SYS02027″ as the second line to make almost everyone happy, but sadly no.

I think that the “Microsoft Workers In Hell” page that can be reached in certain versions of Excel from Line 666 deserves mention. It shows the programmers working in flames, etc. It’s really more of a hidden Easter Egg than a bad error message, but it does get across that espirit-de-corps feeling of working there.

Certainly the Atari ST “Bombs” screen, where the number of bombs indicated the 68000 error code, was always rather exciting to get.
(2 was a Bus Error and so forth.)

But I most enjoyed teaching the Atari to be a Mac (emulator software) because if it crashed, which happened from time to time, any key press or mouse movement would (in effect) press the “Mac” “RESET” button and restart the emulator. So, if you took your fist and hit the table, the system rebooted. That’s my kinda error message handler.

Working with a Cullinet databases in the 80’s, you’d commonly see error msgs like “Fatal embrace in the database, call DBA”, fatal this, fatal that. As a joke, in a test version of our software, I put a joke error msg based on a movie that had just come out, fully intending to change it before production.

2 years later, we get a call from the field, asking, “What the #*^@ does the error ‘Fatal Attraction in the database, call Michael Douglas’ mean??”

You wrote, “The Sad Mac has such a strong flavor of early Macintosh-ishness that it’s easy to develop a false memory that it was part of the platform from the beginning in 1984. Nope–Wikipedia says it first appeared in 1987.”

I’m sorry, I really am, because you made an effort to doublecheck your story, but it looks like Wikipedia is about to get a strong argument from me.

I happen to know this code very, very, *very* well, since I had to adapt it to another computer, with a larger screen size. The Mac screen was 64 bytes wide. The Atari ST screen was 80 bytes wide. So, to make a vertical line on the Mac, you’d move a dot to screen memory, add 64, and move another dot to screen memory, etc. I had to fixup ==all== those 64’s to 80’s so they’d work on the Atari. So let’s say I spent waaaaaaaaaaaay too many hours documenting this code up, down, and sideways, while listening (the horror!) to Neil Young Live Rust!. If I seem a little twitchy about this … well …a case could be made for that point of view.

I had to fix every single frowney, smiley, disk-shaped, ?, X, or what ever Mac icon. I truly do know them all.

In the 64K original (1984) Mac ROMs, of which I have a printout sitting on my lap *right at this moment*, Wikipedia or not, you positively WILL find:

The “Draw a Sad Mac and Do An Error Code Onscreen” at routine BadMac, $4000F4. In that routine, you’ll find the BRAnch to DrawSadMac at $400118, which returns via the address in A6. It then draws numeric codes. You will then find the numeric images of the codes at “numimages” at $40017A. To nail this point down with a hammer, the actual code that *puts them onto the display* is a MOVE.B D5,(A2), at $400146. It’s part of several loops. The system then has its interrupts turned off ($400168) and loops forever to $40016C.

DrawSadMac is invoked in a variety of places. The most famous is the “Dire Straits” Alert Code (a.k.a. the “DsErrCode”). Of course, “Dire Straits” is not what the programmers originally named it; this is a real-bad-news code, the computer is in deep s—. They try to handle it gracefully. But if the system can’t do stuff like an InitGraf, InitPort, and PlotIcon, oh well, it jumps off to BadMac documented above, and BadMac is just not a happy place to go.

Routine DrawSadMac ($4007CC) is combined with other routines, like DrawMac, and DrawHappyMac, that all use common drawing code, but use different images.

This code is directly followed by the images for BlankMac ($40080C), then for other things, like:

I suppose it’ll become tediously necessary for me to decode the number images into Mac screen images to convince the Wikipedia people that gee, the 64K ROMs had this stuff.

I would like to say that the people who wrote these ROMs taught me 68000 programming, in particular, Andy Hertzfeld. The man is a master and I was an apprentice looking over his shoulder. He taught me so many things that I can’t begin to describe them all. He’s a genius.

I hope this puts this stuff about “You had to go to the 128K ROMs to get the certain Mac startup faces” to bed. Because … I also “did” the 128’s, and that printout, too, is around . . .

My favorite error message came from ‘ed’, the original Unix line editor back in the late 70’s. I’d spend 15 minutes concocting the regular expression command I wanted ‘ed’ to execute (e.g., ‘/abc/s/x$1bcd$2yz/yz$1xz$2/g’) and type it in. Ed responds with a simple, elegant error message: ? (a single question mark)
I check the UNIX man page for ‘ed’ and fine the following, under ‘ERRORS”: “?: Error in command. The experienced user will know what to do” (Insert sound of head banging against wall)

I upgraded the original 8088 on my Ericsson Portable PC to a Nec v20. Whoa what a performance boost

The original CPU was soldered to the motherboard, no socket there. I thought I was very careful, but when I finally had soldered a socket in place, put the v20 in the socket and turned the power on, the screen was black.

From the pc – tweeter came “di-di-di daa-daa-daa di-di-di”, “di-di-di daa-daa-daa di-di-di”… SOS! Since this was in the middle of the night, I was afraid the beeping would awake my parents, so I quickly turned it off.

A close inspection revealed a tiny flake of solder that was stuck between two legs on a memory chip close the the CPU. I removed it and everything worked just fine..

The RPC shutdown (from the blaster worm; error 6) can be aborted, by the way, by typing ‘shutdown -a’ at the command prompt or in the windows run box. So, not really a blue/red/grey screen of death when you know how to deal with it.

ORA-29532: Java call terminated by uncaught Java exception: string
Cause: A Java exception or error was signaled and could not be resolved by the Java code.
Action: Modify Java code, if this behavior is not intended.

Or what about good old Java. Bestest language ever. Impossible to write bad programs in. Everybody knows why, it’s because Java doesn’t have any pointers. What’s the most common error newbie Java programmers get? NullPointer Exceptions. BUT JAVA DOESN’T HAVE POINTERS!!! RIGHT!!!!1!

“Segmentation fault”…
Its a classic error, and a pretty common one for C programmers. It has tormented me for years, and from time to time it still torments me.
For me, its way more irritating than a BSoD because, BSoDs are not my fault, “Seg Faults” usualy are!

As A systems Administrator, I like the errors for the sudo program for Linux. The fun part of it is I get to chose how insulting I want the error messages to be. I always set it on the max level. It seems to brighten up everyone’s day.

I seem to remember reading up on the “lp0 is on fire”-thingy. Nowadays, it signals that no other error message fitted, but back in the days, it would come from a failure switch being thrown without some others – a combination that could only be reached by the runaway ink strip (or what it’s called) that would jam the thing – setting it on fire…

Oh, and once I saw a mac complaining about aborting due to a nonexistant failure, which I took to mean that it just couldn’t find the error code in it’s table of those. A tad better would have been the unknown error mentioned above…

My vote is from the early 1980s.
Imagine an entire terminal room with 30 or so undergrads typing away on terminals connected to a DECSYSTEM-20 before a class project deadline. Suddenly every terminal emits a long beep and the message “%DECSYSTEM-20 NOT RUNNING”.

Erie quiet followed usually by cursing.

The front end processor to the main computer detected that the main computer had died.

he scariest place I’ve ever seen a bsod was on an ULTRASOUND machine in the frakin’ _CARDIOLOGY_ wing of a major hospital here in Atlanta! um, windoze running diagnostic medical equipment? I guess it could be worse, they could be using it to run those surgical robots they do bypasses w/nowadays – on 2nd thought, maybe I don’t want to know the answer to that one…

Marc: the “PC LOAD LETTER” error message is fondly remembered in Europe, where all the paper is sized as specified in ISO 216, most printers using A4. Should one know what “LOAD LETTER” means, there is usually no convenient means to obtain “letter” paper. Besides, what would one do with it? The error message can be cancelled with a button anyway…

This error message is generally associated with the following set of conditions: 1) a printer full of A4 paper; 2) a program or printer driver that has U.S. paper sizes as defaults; 3) a user who has forgotten to set the paper size on a new document.

What hasn’t anyone heard of the Mac S.O.S. beep? On some machines, when there is a significant failure, the speaker will beep out S.O.S. in morse code (dit-dit-dit-dah-dah-dah-dit-dit-dit)… I remember this all the way back in the MacSEs and I’ve even seen the current MacBooks do it as well.

This is not an error message, more of a status message and my first “Easter Egg”. Remember the Hayes modem “AT Command Set”? The Apple Personal Modem (1200 baud) would not only respond to an “AT” query with “OK” (per the Hayes set), you could also type in “ET” and it would reply with “Phone Home”.

When I was starting learning my first programming language (in QBASIC) I had my dot-matrix printer’s manual with code that would show off its features. I had made a typo and the error I got was “subscript error”. I was trying to figure out how QBASIC knew I was trying subscript on the printer since the program was mostly a series of LPRINT escape codes. Turned out I had missed a dollar sign on a CHR$(27) and “subscript error” in this context meant “array index out of bounds” on the unitialised “CHR” array variable.

From early sun OS, typed on console:
“ie0: bark”
(watchdog timeout on ethernet interface zero).
“Thanks, Andy.”
Upon a transient parity error in main memory, then a scan of all memory
could not find the fault.
From Microsoft Excel (office 97 to current)
“File Not Saved [Ok]”
You will find a 2 (or 4) Gb file, with an 8 character Hex
name in the working directory. Your .XLS is not saved.

It’s not exactly an *error* message, but the attitude behind “It is now safe to turn off your computer.” used to make me wonder who was in control of things, and what retribution the machine might exact if I shut it down otherwise.

Hmm, there is one I like more than most of these, and that’s an error some programs (most notably VMWare) give, and that’s a popup window titled “Error”, and the contents of the window “Success” with a red and white error icon. I’m proud of myself for being able to get Schrodinger’s Error.

I used to assemble 286 and 386 computers and I used those bios beeps a lot to tell me what was wrong with a new system. Six beeps was memory, our most common problem as I recall.

Not exactly an error message but a warning of sorts: We had a programmer who wanted to build a computer and we let him. It had those poorly keyed power connectors and he forced them on the wrong way. When he switched on the power, all the caps blew and destroyed the motherboard rather spectacularly. He never asked to help again.

When Honeywell mainframes running the GCOS operating system crashed, the message affectionately known as “Pick 1″ would be typed on the console. The operator could choose dumping an image of main memory to tape, disk, none, etc.

I once had my machine begin to chime a classical tune (Fur Elise?) endlessly as I was coincidentally installing a program. It turned out my CPU fan had just failed and the motherboard was singing a warning for CPU temp out of range. I was completely unaware of this “feature” and believed my machine had become zombied or stoned because I was killing Window process to no avail.

In the end, I ask, if they could make it sing why not simply announce “this is your motherboard speaking: warning CPU temperature error”?

Was this a horrible error so bad that it’s name could not be spoken?
Was BASIC about to say some swear and censored itself?
Or (as was really the case) the error number out of range of the text messages in the error table.

I assume the FailWhale logo is connected to Douglas Adams, who continues to inspire so many software developers. In ”The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” we find: “Another thing that got forgotten was the fact that against all probability a sperm whale had suddenly been called into existence several miles above the surface of an alien planet. And since this is not a naturally tenable position for a whale, this poor innocent creature had very little time to come to terms with its identity as a whale before it then had to come to terms with not being a whale any more. This is a complete record of its thoughts from the moment it began its life till the moment it ended it.” The whale crashes to earth with all the speed that gravity would expect of it. Note that the logo looks more like a boxy-headed sperm whale than a streamlined a rorqual.

How can you make a list of greatest error messages and not include Oracle errors?
Messages that seem like random codes. that link to problems so generic you could rebuild the whole darn database faster then figuring out the error.

One of my favorites was I had a motherboard years back that when the CMOS battery was dead started playing the Fleur de Lise from the PC speaker constantly. It was a very weird error to be sure. Later found out that one of the people that coded the BIOS had put it in as a joke and only one production run actually had the error. Wish I had kept the board just for fun.

The error I had most fun with was on the Vic 20 and Commodore 64
If U attempted to load a file from disk with no disk drive fitted it would first inform you that it was trying to find the file then tell you it couldn’t find the floppy drive. As a result of which you could have lots of fun.

We used to run Lotus cc:mail on Windows 3.1 at work. It would frequently bring up an error dialog box showing an icon (a black exclamation mark in a yellow circle), an “OK” button – and nothing else. WTF?

1983/4 Using a Harris-100 running Harris-VOS, compiling my very first COBOL program, and not knowing that a period was required on practically every line in COBOL.

SYNTAX Error. Missing dot.

It took me for… ever to figure out… that a ‘dot’ was a PERIOD.
Since I had access to the system message libraries… I went in and changed the message to ‘Missing Period at end of sentence.’ So that the other students in the class wouldn’t be as confused as me.

Years later… when using a VAX/VMS machine… I loved the fact that you could have aa combination of ‘fatal’ error messages

I used to work for Southwest Technical Products Corporation (SWTPc), and
they had a terminal called the X-12. It had an onboard voice synthesizer. If you misprogrammed something in the setup menu of the terminal, then on the next power-cycle a loud voice would announce “X twelve set up fail.”

The difference between Abort and Fail was really only ever noticeable in batch operations.

Abort would actually abort the entire batch job you were running, whereas Fail or Ignore would skip the one line that was erroring and continue on to the next line, which sometimes allowed the batch to continue. (most of the times it wouldn’t, ofcourse.)

Great article, awesome trip back through nostalgia. I had long since forgotten about the Guru Meditations my Amigas would throw up at me frequently.

A long time ago in Brazil we were not allowed to import hardware nor software, and the big hardware manufacturers had to write their own code. A friend of mine, quite a potty mouth, wrote part of a Cobol compiler for the biggest computer manufacturer in the country. After the release of the compiler people started to call support because they were getting a message with the Portuguese equivalent of “Oh! s#!% happened”. It was my friend’s version of “command too complex”. I always searched for a list of four letter words before releasing any code he wrote, because he did NOT learn the lesson…

The best I have ever seen is about a year ago. I was working with a software team doing 3rd party java applications for mobile phones. One of the applications the did tried to launch one of the phones native applications. When it failed it displayed the pretty offending error message: “Could not find the native to execute.”

20 something years ago, the warehouse started selling commedore 64.
They were on display powered on, without anything preventing you from just typing on it.

I started copying basic listings and trying them on them.
Naturally I made many typo’s, and unaware of the impact even the smallest typo has on code, I could not understand why it always said:
SYNTAX ERROR IN 20
or somewhere.

Eventually, I just removed the line of code in an attempt to fix it.
And after removing 60% of the code, I walked away dissapointed.

The new IT-manager at one of the companys i work with should log on to the old economy-system hosted on AS/400 for the first time, but got something wrong in the username or password and got promted “BAD USER” right in his face. That brougt up some laughs.
What more is there to say, sometimes the systems seems to know a hole lot…

“Does not compute” means that a instructions can’t be processed due to a wrong value of the operands.
For example 4/0 is a not computable instruction because it’s a indetermination and it doesn’t have a result.
Basically it’s a fail in the assignation of the values of the variables.

Sadly, Apple continues to push useless error codes on its users like no other software company. They stopped using hexadecimal notation, but that is about it. In terms of errors (and error codes) iTunes is, by far, the worst software I have installed on my computer today.

Anyway, I like this error message (Windows):
“The maximum number of secrets that may be stored in a single system has been exceeded.”

Abort, Retry, Fail? (MS-DOS). A similar error like this still exists in Window XP even. If you have a diskette drive installed and get a A: driver error the choices “continue”, “retry”, “cancel” is available to you. I guess it’s easier to understand these choices but I think the underlying functions are the same as the MS-DOS version.

I used to work on the helpdesk for a company that sold software to bakers. One of the programmers had put in one of my favourite error messages that would scroll slowly along the bottom of the screen…

“Muppet Movie Beeker Error.”

It meant nothing and would only happen at certain times around his birthday. The bakers would get most upset and panic about their software so we used to take the opportunity to wind them up a little before “fixing” it. The free cakes we got in appreciation were welcome though :).

An early IBM 7094 FORTRAN compiler used to say “Beta table overflow” if you tried to do too many complicated things.

The UNIX Ed editor used to say ‘eh?’ or just ‘?’ for just about anything that went wrong.

The UNIX pr command would say ‘Very funny!’ when you screwed up some of the input arguments. It wasn’t…

The UNIX PCC compiler once produced a message “gummy structure”…

Early GE/Honeywell systems had a help subsystem. An error number would be produced, and you could type the number into the help system to get an explanation. As the system creaked into understanding (gasp!) lower case, it became evident that many of the error messages had o’s instead of 0’s in them. So an error message might have number o72. If you typed this into the help subsystem, it went bonkers, spewing random characters, changing the typewriter ribbon color several times, typing random characters, and ended by spewing a couple of yards of papter into your face before crashing utterly. Help, indeed…

To me, the worst ever has to be the power-on beeps; especially the 11 beeps. It sounded like self-destruct mode, and was as obnoxious as a fire alarm. Since the computer was useless at that moment, I wold shut it down immediately.

Guru Meditation (Amiga) was popular, cool, and scary at the same time, while most others were just too technical and made from boring people with business backgrounds. I would agree that “Syntax Error” should get mentioned too.

Actually, I was able to use the Abort, Retry, Ignore? (MS-DOS) error message usefully to an extent. I remember encountering this error when copying files from a floppy disk to a fixed (hard) disk or from one logical drive to another. Pressing (A)bort would cancel the command, I would re-insert the floppy disk and press (R)etry and press (I)gnore to simply copy what I could salvage on the floppy disk.

Great.I heard of this blog from a friend.I am searching for configuration for a desktop with quad core processors.Plz Guide me. also tell me should i go for 45nm process or 65 nm will do. Thanks in advance

My favorite was an error I saw on my old PowerBook, running 10.2.8, when I tried to boot off a CD with only iMac drivers. It kernel paniced, and the end of a long block of gibberrish was “panic: We are hanging here…”
It’s those little touches that make computers so interesting sometimes. And frusturating.

I thought the best error message was the lack of error message I got when trying to continue reading this article. Clicking next or on any of the next pages just brings the same page up again. ie: Your wordpress appears to be stuffed or something.

Back in 1985, we had a variety of mini-mfs to work with. Our products generated a few interesting errors, but my favorite of all time came after an unresolved variable call, which resulted in a 76-page dump file, at the top of which read “Error during crawl out.”

“Not only are all “add-ons” enabled, but WTF is with “add-on?” is this microspeak for plugin? what’s wrong with plugin? everybody else in the world informally convened and agreed to use “plugin” to mean plugin. why does microsoft unnecessarily complicating things have to run into to vocabulary too ? i want an answer on this choice of word – “add-on.””

Firefox uses the term “add-on” to describe the whole collection of extensions, themes and plugins installed on your system, so I don’t see what’s wrong with the term. Plugins are a different things from extensions/add-ons because they are usually coming from an external source to provide functionality – like DLLs or .so libraries for Flash or Java. I’m not sure about IE add-ons, but FF extensions are using special internal languages specific to the browser (like XUL) and are usually only compatible with that browser.

The NullPointerException in Java happens when code is pointing to a null value somewhere, which might have something or nothing to do with *pointers as most people know them. References are usually still pointers too, so a = b; b = 4; makes a have a value of 4…

I encountered on the IBM 1130 using FORTRAN IV with commercial subroutines the best error messages of all time. The “F” errors were displayed on a console, and the easiest way to know what they meant was to memorize them.

I don’t remember all of them now, but F101 was the one I got most frequently — File record too large, equal to zero, or negative. Another one was F10A — Subscripting has destroyed the Define File Table. This occurs when a subscript exceeds the specification in a DIMENSION statement.

The error messages were actually quite informative, but it did make you feel like a complete dolt to get one!

“Incompetent user error” IIRC was quite common with Lotus Notes (versions around 4)
“The computer is busy, please wait” on Windows versions in the 95 product line. Like, “hey, I’ve got better things to do than those you want me to do” or something.

And, the best:
“An error occurred because an error occurred”
Can’t remember the exact occasion, but it was on Mac OS (version 6 or 7) while connecting to internet using a dialup connection.

From Mac OS 9:
The command could not be completed, because you have already chosen Shut Down or Restart.
Wait until the computer finishes shutting down or restarting, or quit all applications and choose Shut Down or Restart again.

I don’t see anything wrong with pirated music and movies, I download both all the time, and you know what? I buy more stuff like that than I ever did before I started pirating, and if I haven’t bought something I think is worth paying for, it’s simply because I can’t afford it so they wouldn’t be getting my money either way. I just spent 400 dollars on all four seasons of doctor who which I also have as downloaded divx. I’ve even bought software, couldn’t deal with the copy protection, so downloaded a cracked version so I wouldn’t have to. I don’t think the RIAA or MPAA is really losing money from pirating, I think they are losing money by being lazy and not putting out worthy content. The book publisher Baen realizes this, so you know what they do? They put there books online for free download expecting the extra word of mouth from people trying books they nessacarily wouldn’t have risked there money on then telling friends about it who buy it. The first time I read Ender’s Game was a prirated copy I downloaded, now I own 5 copies of the book in different editions. So for me at least, it works.

Back in the days (Early 1980s) Texas Instruments produced minicomputers (the TI-990). They developed a Forms package, cleverly named “TI-Forms”.
It was possible to get an Error Message of “Shut ‘er down Clancy, she’s a pumpin’ mud’ [an old Texas old field saying]. Not only could you get the message, it was even documented – apparently it had slipped by the proof reader.

How could you forget the Windows 95 classic? “This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down. If the problem persists, contact the program vendor.” And the more clueless the user, the more worried they are that something illegal has happened on their watch.

The amiga Guru meditation codes were designed to debug said messages, often times they told you what failed, when, why, and how.

The guru part of it was a in-joke to the programmers, which there are a few Easter eggs in the OS anyway. but the gurus were the core OS coders, who more or less knew every detail in and out of the hardware.

There was a specific format to that, but I’ve forgotten it years ago. Though, it’s probably on wikipedia.

1. Years ago at school I tried to listen to a CD – “Master of Puppets” by Metallica – in a Mac. System 8, I know it was after 7 and before X and pretty sure it wasn’t 9 because I almost completely missed that one. Long story. Anyhow, as I loaded the CD up in the media player and it began playing, MacOS asked me if I wanted to format the disc! I clicked OK to humor it, but then it seemed serious. Like it was ready to format a 640MB CD-ROM to the Mac format. And this was before burners! I have no idea how that all came about, but I canceled it and continued to listen to the CD.

2. I would swear the Guru Meditation story was nicked off me at some point. Not sure if I ever blogged about it, but that’s one of my favorite geek stories to tell. We had two Commodore-Amigas growing up – the 1000 and then the 2000. My dad swore up and down Apple and Microsoft would fall before Commodore. Yeah, we all see how that went. But almost nobody else had Amigas who I knew growing up. So one day we have some people over, and we go to put on the Prevue Channel (what it was before TV Guide bought them out) and it was frozen with the Guru Meditation error. Nobody knew what it was but me. But the Prevue Channel was national, maybe even international, and if it ran on Amigas everywhere, it’s entirely likely a lot of people saw Guru Meditation errors on their televisions, not just me.

I walked into a Best Buy last fall and saw this Kernel Panic on their big screen behind the Apple display. It had been like that for 3 and a half hours when I shot this pic.http://www.thatmacguy.net/kernelpanic.jpg
The manager of the store didn’t seem too worried.

BeOS used to (correction, still has!) to have Error 404 haiku’s which were varied every time you got the error. I supposed all the websites which feature Haiku’s were inspired from this, or re-inspired by someone who visited a site inspired by BeOS’s cute messages. You could install BeOS in less than 5 minutes. You could be on the internet hours ahead of Installing windows 3.1 or 3.11, going to the ISP’s dialup BBS, downloading the Win32 Extensions to make windows 3 a 32-bit os ( which included Freecell as its demo of whether Win32 was working). Then you download Trumpet Winsock which added a TCP/IP stack to windows 3, and then finally downloading NETSCAPE Navigator. Of course this process is somewhat anachronistic, Beos came out for the Mac and PC after windows95 but it was a good multimedia os for it’s time and ran fast on anything, even multiprocessing server computers that windows 95 could only use the single processor. BeOS could use up to 64 processors on a single computer and was available for more than just pc’s and macs. It was going to be THE OS for anything that wanted on the internet, like these new smartphones or your where you kept your beer. ( “hello, tony’s pony keg?” “yes?” “good, this is matt brady’s refrigerator, I’m out of beer and dont want to upset matt, can you send someone with three cases of XXXX brand cervesa so we wont have an argument when he gets home?” “thank you, it seems some people have hacked into the windows-running house computer and let themselves in and are now drinking all my beer” “oh by the way, do you know a good carpet cleaning service” “oh yes,of course, actually I’m on the other line with the police now sending them scans of fingerprints I scanned off my doorlatch. Dont need it right away, just about two hours from now, the police will be leaving and wont be able to drink the new beer.”

I have a screen print over my desk of a little gem from MS Access having a little tussle with an ODBC driver: “There was a problem sending the command to the program”. What problem? Which command? Which program? Do you think it would it make life too easy for me if you gave me some kind of sodding clue?

“boo dee DEE — The number you have dialed — five, five, five, one, two, one, two — is not in service. Please check the number and try your call again.”

In the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s, this message ended with:
“If you need further assistance, please ask your operator. This is a recording.” This part was back when operators were actually available as easily as a single key press (”0″), and people were so unaccustomed to hearing prerecorded voices that they might attempt to engage in a conversation with it.

There is a strong possibility that this may be the most commonly encountered error message ever (so far), with one exception:

THE BUSY SIGNAL. Universally known, but slightly different sounding from country to country. The busy signal was useful shorthand for “you can’t call that number because that phone is off the hook.” Which was fortunate, because why call someone, if they are already talking to someone else? It made perfect sense in the days before voice mail.

I believe this qualifies as an error message, because it indicated that the request was abandoned, and the device needed to be re-booted before another attempt was made.

When coding C++ in Visual Studio 2005 I got an error that said “Error: Looks like a function body” the line it took me to was indeed (and supposed to be) a function body. I don’t know what it’s problem was but the good old Clean/rebuild fixed it.

If you haven’t yet seen The Daily WTF (http://thedailywtf.com/), you should check it out. One of the fairly regular front-page features is various stupid error messages, of which publicly-projected BSoDs are the mildest.

I disagree with you slightly on one point, though: while hexadecimal error codes aren’t *directly* useful to most users, just typing an error code into google (along with a bit of context like “bsod” or “stop error”) will often get you considerably closer to solving the problem. While not all users will know to do that (and quite honestly, we shouldn’t even have to in the first place), it is a better option than flailing around in the dark.

1. The windows ERROR ERROR which happened to me when an Error message started to appear froze and then another Error message popped up that was called an ERROR Error and said “There was a problem displaying the ERROR” and had the choices of O.K. and Cancel but cancel was whited out.

2. The next was the BLANK Error that I got after mozilla, photoshop, task manager, and windows explorer crashed that came up and didn’t say anything but had the options of O.K. and Cancel. When I clicked on cancel I received my first ever BSoD.

It’s not error messages that have infuriated me the most, not even the annoying “Guru meditation” on my Amiga 500. Why got my goat was Microshaft blaming users for their own poor programming. After rebooting from a crash, Lose95 and Lose98 would state:

“Windows was not shut down properly.”

Microshaft was inferring that it was the user’s action, not a crash by the operating system despite the fact that was the cause 99.99% of the time. If Bill Gates were to be smacked in the face with a frying pan for every instance where he blamed the users for his OS’s crashes, he would have been dead years before USB was a gleam in anyone’s eye.

There was an old joke in the 1990s about Windoze and crashes that was based on a fact. Windoze would count in 32 bits, one bit for every second. Doing the math, 2^32-1 bits would equal or 49.7 days. In other words, if Windoze were left running for 49.7 days, it would crash.

Windoze 95 could run for seven weeks without crashing? It could barely manage seven hours.

In DOS when the computer would lock up you would get what my buddies and I called the Black Screen Of Death. A void where nothing can come back from. Black and Death go hand in hand and when WIndows 95 came along the “Blue” SoD just took over without skipping a beat.

Best error message ever was in an alpha version public domain game many years ago, I don’t remember the exact wording but it said something like “f*ck yourself in the knee, stop eating my pizzas and write proper error messages!”

If I recall, with the advent (well use) of the ps/2 port, the keyboard error became basically useless, because the system had to be turned off before plugging in the keyboard. (Not sure, it’s been quite a few years since I have used an actual ps/2 keyboard.)

I don’t know what model of Mac it was but she actually called me to tell me about this error message. And she still really likes her Mac. I dig PC’s. And, somehow, we’re still able to communicate and laugh together like civilized adults…

My all time favorite came out of an extinct accounting system called ResMax. I was updating some journal entries and everything halted with the error message ‘Error: Total CRAP”. Checking with the programmer it turned out that it was a concatonated error message that should have read ‘Error: Total Credit Applied’ but the error handler stack was from the ‘CR’ routine and then the ‘AP’ routine, hence the insulting error message.

Having programmed IBM mainframes, my vote is for “0C5″, the most information-less code ever devised. A mysterious man named Dan Nessett once wrote this bit of doggerel, which perfectly describes the situation, methinks.

“I Was Wondering About This Error Message,” I said

Beneath my stare began to blur
10,000 lines of print.
Buried alive by 0C5
Which gave not clue nor hint.

Up from my chair, I neard the lair
Branded “Consultants’ Room.
With puzzled gaze I paraphrased
My mind’s perplexing gloom.

“That bilious sty of wire,” said I,
“Has dumped its DUMP on me.
I cannot guess where in that mess
I’ll find the missing key.”

“The clues are everywhere,” he said.
And I began to think
Of : “Water, water everywhere
But not a drop to drink.”

“Aha!” said he, “Your DCB
Has lost BUFL.
MSHI is far to high
And BLKSIZE looks not well.”

“BLDL in this case will
Cause 0C5 or 4.
To BSP hex ‘503’
Will backspace low cost store.”

“You FREEMAIN twice and GETMAIN once’
This cannot be advised.
And all of this, I’m positive
Has caused your 0C5.”

My jaw had slackened to my knees;
A fly flew in my mouth.
I gathered up my SYSUDUMP
And crawled off in a slouch.

My company gave us these HP (Hewlett Pacard) iPAQ Voice Messenger mobile phones which apparently had more flaws than functions. The best of the error messages from those little buggers read: "The phone is turned off. Do you want to turn it on?"
And then you had to turn it off…to turn it on.

"Dick Fell". What exactly would your reaction be when your system promptly shut down leaving you only with these two words and a prompt?

And the error was persistent. The client was running an aged Commodore Pet installation, and the error was narrowed down to a single machine. It had developed a fault in the IO controller resulting in a single bit error.

The BSOD in windows can actually be colour changed by you. There is a settings file which contains the colours which will be used when the screen appears. This is to cater for people with certain vision impairments.

I would say the bomb error was a far more famous error on the Mac than the Sad Mac. I read that the designer of the error, Susan Kare, was given free creative expression in designing the error and so she created the bomb icon. It threw some users into a tizzy, because they saw the computer as not only failing them but mocking them in the process.

I have number 14, right here at your website:
"Waiting for polldaddy.com"
Each one of these pages takes eons to load. I can't stand the thought of even going past the third page. Get a new survey company.

Ah, surely the best error message of all time would be produced by an Acorn BBC Microcomputer (circa 1983) in response to the user inputting an illogical mathematical problem. The error message, in simple white text on a black background was:

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Microsoft Word (2003?) would give me a error message during routine operation of ‘could not get instance of redemption’. I briefly considered if my software had gotten religion. Also, I recommended to a friend that he name his band Instance Of Redemption.

Most flabbergasting: the ever-so-helpful "An error has occurred." (Or simply "Error!") No details on what the error was, where it occurred, how to diagnose it, or what to do about it. Just remembering it makes my blood boil. Over the years I've seen it (and others like it) on too many systems to list.

Most humorous: On unix, "cat" was used to output the contents of a file to the screen. Tell the C shell "cat food", and you'll get "cat: cannot open food"

And of course imagine running a PDP10 app in a nuclear facility and seeing the all-too-common:

What a riot! I never worked on a CAD tool; but we used to scatter messages like that around our code in locations that were theoretically unreachable — like the line after a JUMPA ("jump always") instruction in PDP10 assembly language. Never bothered to make the messages useful, because it really shouldn't have been possible for people to see them.

I especially like your "Congratulations, you're hosed" — reminds me of an old favorite:

I cut my teeth in programming on an IBM 1130. My favorite error message was "M13 – Execution suppressed". The system allowed you to look up "M13" in a list for detailed explanation. Result:
"Execution was suppressed because the system detected a condition that would prevent successful execution".

Okay, contacted polldaddy.com & they don't use flash which is what I disabled to get some response from your site. Today its not freezing up for 20 seconds, you can actually scroll so I guess the offending flash (advertisement) has been removed.

The best I have ever seen is about a year ago. I was working with a software team doing 3rd party java applications for mobile phones. One of the applications the did tried to launch one of the phones native applications. When it failed it displayed the pretty offending error message: "Could not find the native to execute."

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This Blue Screen of Death (perhaps better known as the BSOD) from a Windows 98/Windows 98SE/Windows ME operating system indicates the worst. And it's become the best known and most spoofed error message of all-time.

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The most common one I encounter is the 404 error on the web, I spend a lot of my time there. Also I added up the percentages, first in my head then with a calculator, and both time I got 99.99%. But I’m probably just wrong. Anyway love this article!

[…] wouldn’t be the same without ‘em. So I rounded up a baker’s dozen of the most important error messages in computing history – from Does Not Compute to Abort, Retry, Fail to the Sad Mac to the big kahuna […]

[…] know ‘em, you love ‘em (you know you do really) and now Technologizer has compiled the 13 greatest error messages of all time, beginning with this classic: Abort, Retry Fail. It could indicate either a minor glitch (you […]

[…] Anderson under Education, Historical, Research, Technology For our Friday fun this week, we link over to Technologizer and a list of the 13 greatest computer error messages of all time, including the “Guru Meditation” error message, the red screen of death, and the […]